Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, in custody in '09, was busted in a conspiracy to transport organs.SL

(
)

On July 23, 2009, FBI agents descended on New York and New Jersey, arresting more than 40 politicians and Orthodox rabbis in the largest federal corruption case ever in New Jersey’s notoriously corrupt history. The arrests grabbed headlines around the world and upended the race for governor of New Jersey — a campaign eventually won by Chris Christie, who as New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor had started the investigation. In this excerpt from “The Jersey Sting,” two reporters who covered the case focus on one of its more surreal aspects — the illegal sale of human kidneys.

The investigation was stalled and Chris Christie was bored.

Then the US attorney in New Jersey, Christie had agreed to let real estate investor Solomon Dwek turn state’s evidence and go to work for the FBI as the feds continued trolling for corrupt pols in the Garden State. But Dwek, after being arrested for a $50 million bank fraud, had been turning up nothing but rabbis laundering cash.

“How’s he helping us? Where is this going?” Christie asked Jim Nobile, the secretive chief of the corruption unit.

But Nobile had an ace up his sleeve. His team had stumbled upon a new scam with ties to their prized informant: a black-market kidney-transplant operation, and Dwek could take them inside.

As Nobile outlined it to him, Christie suddenly sat up. “What?” he said in disbelief.

There was someone in the Orthodox community in Brooklyn, Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, allegedly brokering human kidney transplants for about $150,000 a pop.

“You’re kidding me,” Christie said.

They were not.

“That’s definitely against the law, right?” Christie said.

“Yes” was the answer.

The law actually dated to 1984, when a Virginia physician, after losing his license over a Medicare/Medicaid fraud conviction, announced plans to establish the world’s first organ-brokering service. The outrage was immediate. A Tennessee congressman named Al Gore introduced legislation banning such sales, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch sponsored similar legislation in the Senate.

Yet no one had ever been prosecuted under the statute. If the Dwek prosecutors made a case, Rosenbaum was going to be a first.

GRANDPA’S LEGACY

Christie did not authorize it right away. It took months to get the US Attorney’s Office to sign off on the approach before launching Dwek at Rosenbaum.

Federal tax records showed Rosenbaum had ties to a Brooklyn-based charity organization called Kav Lachayim (“path to life”) United Lifeline. The returns filed by the non-profit showed Rosenbaum listed as president and a brief description of its focus as meeting the medical needs of children. But Rosenbaum claimed to have had more than a decade of experience meeting the medical needs of other clients — those looking to pay for healthy kidneys. And Dwek knew well how it worked. The reason he was able to put him on a plate for the feds is that he had told them that his own grandfather had bought a kidney from Rosenbaum.

Rosenbaum allegedly had his own network of connections and was known as the man to go to in New York. Short and a little overweight, with a full gray beard and matching moustache, he was described by one Israeli who met him as very Orthodox but “jolly and very off-color.”

Dwek finally called Rosenbaum in mid-February of 2008 on a Friday, just before the start of the Sabbath. Dwek said his secretary had a desperately ill uncle, Teddy Moses. Uncle Teddy needed a kidney transplant to live. Rosenbaum invited Dwek to come to his home. The “secretary” was actually undercover FBI agent Jessica Weisman. “Uncle Teddy” was a figment of the FBI’s imagination.

Dwek and Weisman drove to Brooklyn, where Rosenbaum lived in a large three-story brick home on 21st Avenue in Flatbush. There were graceful wrought-iron balconies and a grand bay façade on the second level, set on a street of far more modest houses. “I’m in real estate,” said Rosenbaum by way of introduction, his voice picked up on an FBI surveillance video camera worn by Dwek. He had told neighbors he worked in construction.

They immediately got down to business. Uncle Teddy, said Dwek, was “having some kidney issues. He’s on dialysis.”

Wired for video and audio as always, Dwek immediately made it clear why they were there: “He needs to, you know, organize to buy one and we need to find how we can do this. I told him I’d take care of the financial arrangements.”

“So who is the needy one?” Rosenbaum asked.

“My uncle,” the agent told Rosenbaum.

In addition to a name, the FBI gave him a critical condition — the kind of detail necessary to make the scam look real. “Teddy,” they said, was on the transplant list at a hospital in Philadelphia.

The way it worked, Rosenbaum explained, was that he would send a blood sample to find a matching prospective donor. “If you want to arrange it faster, then I bring the donor over here,” Rosenbaum explained. “The hospital is the authority who decide it’s a match or not. Not me, not you, not him, not nobody.”

“Let me explain to you one thing,” Rosenbaum continued. “It’s illegal to buy or sell organs. So you cannot buy it. What you do is, you’re giving a compensation for the time — whatever — he’s not working.”

‘HE NEEDED THE MONEY’

The key, Rosenbaum said, was to concoct some kind of relationship between donor and recipient, make up a story that would hold up under questioning.

“The hospital is asking what’s the relationship between the donor and the recipient,” he said. “So we put in a relationship — friends, or neighbor, or business relations — any relation.”

“Cousins? Third cousins?” Dwek asked.

No. Rosenbaum shook his head.

“You wouldn’t go to cousins. The recipient is not going to be investigated, but the donor is investigated. So if you start with family, it’s real easy to find out if he’s not. It’s not the family, because the names and the ages and who is who — it doesn’t work good.”

He brushed aside the problems.

Dwek then asked what it would cost.

“The price with what we are asking here is $150,000,” said Rosenbaum.

Dwek brought up the name of a patient they both knew. He had only been charged $140,000, noted Dwek.

Rosenbaum just laughed. “I knew that was coming,” he said.

Bargaining, however, was not on his agenda. He said half of the total cost would have to be paid up front, with the rest due when they got the donor to the hospital.

“I take care of the guy after the surgery,” Rosenbaum told them.

“What do you mean?” asked Dwek.

“I place him somewhere,” said Rosenbaum. “You have to baby-sit him like a baby because he may have a language problem, maybe not.”

The donor had to be paid, and the doctors in Israel who would examine the donor, and then the expenses in preparing the visa work, and paying the donor’s expenses in the United States.

The following week, Dwek and his “secretary” returned to Rosenbaum’s house. He again repeated for the surveillance camera that buying or selling a kidney was illegal.

That’s exactly what prosecutors wanted to hear when the DVD was played back in Newark. Rosenbaum was oblivious to the trap. Instead, he dug a deeper hole for himself, trying to reassure his new clients. It was the donor, he said, who would be the one facing the questions. “They’re going to investigate him . . . and it is our job to prepare him,” Rosenbaum explained.

Rosenbaum gave them the name of one recipient who had received a kidney transplant four years earlier, and offered to give them other references.

The next day, the FBI agent Weisman used a phone number Rosenbaum had given her and contacted one of his earlier kidney transplant customers, in her role as Dwek’s secretary. The former patient acknowledged that he paid Rosenbaum cash for the kidney and the operation had been done at an out-of-state hospital about a year earlier. “Why do you think the donor was willing to give up a kidney?” the agent asked.

“I guess he needed the money.”

Uncle Teddy never got a kidney. Rosenbaum was arrested with 43 others on July 23, 2009.

Adapted from “The Jersey Sting: The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money-Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought It All DSt. Martin’s Press), out now.